Jocelyn Paine

Dr. Dobb's Bloggers

In Silicon No One Can Hear You Scream

November 22, 2010

In his book of TV reviews "The Crystal Bucket", Clive James writes of David Attenborough...

In his book of TV reviews The Crystal Bucket, Clive James
writes of David Attenborough:

It is a lucky break that the presenter looks normal, because some
of the life-forms he is presenting look as abnormal as the mind
can stand. To Attenborough all that lives is beautiful:
he possesses, to a high degree, the quality that Einstein
called Einfühlung — the intellectual love
for the objects of experience. Few who saw it will forget
Attenborough's smile of ecstasy as he stood, some years ago,
knee-deep in a conical mound of Borneo bat-poo. Miles
underground, with cockroaches swarming all over him and millions
of squeaking bats crapping on his head, he was as radiant
as Her Majesty at the races.

How long will it be before such emotions can be inspired by the
evolved objects of digital
experience?
I've been looking at Thomas Miconi's
page Evolving Virtual creatures.
Miconi is a postdoctoral researcher
working on neural models of visual scene perception,
a topic illustrated on
his home page
by a low-resolution image of
Charles Darwin. Continuing the theme of evolution, the home page also links to
Miconi's thesis, The Road to
Everywhere: Evolution, Complexity and Progress in Natural and Artificial Systems,
subtitled Everything you vaguely thought you'd
like to know about
evolution, but couldn't really be bothered to ask. But one
thing I already know about evolution is that it works.
And in case there are any creationists out there who still
doubt this, look at the virtual-worlds videos linked from
Evolving Virtual creatures.

I took this posting's title, "In Silicon No One Can Hear You Scream",
from one of Miconi's papers. It's
appropriate, because most of his videos depict creatures
evolved to fight.
For example,
Evolving
fighting creatures 7
shows one small creature which constantly tries to aim its swinging tail
at its larger opponent, which hits back using what Miconi calls a
"flail" appendage. And in Evolving
box-grabbing creatures 1, a V-shaped
creature resembling a caterpillar
sliced down the middle and rejoined at the tail fights
for possession of a box with a smaller and
less nimble animal that moves by rolling. Miconi believes
his evolution of fighting
is a first: there had been previous attempts, but they were simplistic.

Miconi's work reimplements
Karl Sims's
Evolved Virtual
Creatures project, which I summarised
here,
for the old Dobbs AI
Newsletters. Sims's animations showed a
simulated beachside world — complete with a physics
engine which implemented both gravity and friction — in
which he had placed an initial population of several
hundred simple blocklike creatures with randomly-generated bodies
and nervous systems. Each creature was tested for its ability to
perform a pre-specified task. Those that were most successful
survived, and their genes were copied, combined, and mutated to make
offspring for a new population. The new creatures were once again
tested, and so evolution continued.
One of the tasks set for the creatures
was to move as far as possible in a certain direction.
Members of the first generation might only twitch
or stand like sticks, but as simulated
generations were born and died, impressive
results emerged, such as a helical snake which
had evolved to gain purchase on the ground by
friction, moving forward by spiralling along its axis.

Miconi says that his work is the first
successful
reimplementation of Karl Sims' system. He has improved
the genetic encoding and the way creatures develop after "birth".
Moreover, whereas Sims's creatures
had complicated neurons, into which he had
preprogrammed a lot of behaviour,
Miconi's have much simpler neurons that need considerably more
help from evolution.
There's more info,
including a
download,
at Evolving
Virtual creatures. With faster evolution and a more advanced
physics engine, perhaps someone will be able to do fluid dynamics,
wings, and flight. At least the bat-poo will be virtual.

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